A Guide to Visual Supports and How to Implement Them at Home
Visual supports are hugely helpful for any child or adult with difficulties communicating. Visual supports are pictures that help your loved one to understand what you are saying, or to help your tell you what they need, want, feel, and think.
Who do visual supports work for?
Visual supports can be empowering for children with Autism, adults with dementia, and children or adults with developmental expressive/receptive language disorders. They are also helpful for loved ones with acquired language disorders such as Aphasia following a stroke, or language difficulties following a traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Reasons for Using Visual Supports
Enable your loved to tell you what they need, want, feel, and think - visual supports can assist with expressive communication for your loved one!
Ensure your loved one understands what you are trying to tell them - visual supports can also help with your loved one’s receptive language, or how well they understand!
Types of Visual Supports
Photographs - these can be photographs of you and your individual loved one and their environment, or just generic photographs you find online
Pictures - you can also use illustrated pictures that show a person, action, place, or thing
Symbols - these might be symbols like common symbols for “no” (a circle with a line through it), or visual representations of signs (like bringing two hands together with fingers pinched together to sign “more”
Text - written words are also a type of visual support! You can just simple letters, words, or even sentences - it just depends on what works best for you and your loved one
Practical Applications
Choice boards - as caregivers, you are already experts on your loved ones’ interests. By giving our loved ones’ a way to make and then communicate their choices, we empower them. You can make choice boards for meal times, leisure activities, motivational/highly preferred activities, academic activities, or chores around the house. Giving people a choice suddenly makes non-preferred activities feel preferred!
Labeling household items - label everything in your house, especially if you’re working on helping your loved one with reading or associating symbols with meaning! Whether you’re using text, symbols, or illustrations, label that refrigerator! Put the word “door” on the door, put the symbol for “TV” on the television - make your visual system come alive and grow legs of practical application for your loved one!
Visual Schedules/Checklists - everyone has tasks they don’t love. For loved ones with communication disorders, they might have a hard time understanding exactly what is involved in completing a non-preferred task, and once they understand that there are a discrete set of steps to complete, suddenly it may not feel as daunting. Maybe it’s a bedtime routine, perhaps it’s the process of doing the dishes - by creating steps with visual supports alongside each step, you can show your loved one how much work needs to get done before the task is completed! You can follow a similar system for an entire day’s schedule, checking things off so your loved one knows what’s coming next.
Feelings boards - my mental health colleagues have shown me just how powerful communicating feelings can be! By providing your loved one with a feelings board, you can empower them to tell you how they’re feeling. You can create these with photographs you find online, or even take photographs of your loved one showing how they look when they feel excited or frustrated.
Give it a try! See how you can use visual supports at home, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you need a hand getting set up! Contact us here on our Contact page to let us know how we can help!